Studio 2 Journal Entry Week: 11

Wow its getting close now, to the end of this Trimester...

I watched ALLOT of tutorials this week as i figured out that there was allot that I had to quickly learn before putting my scene together in UE4.

So this week I figured out how to set up PBR Materials in Maya and UE4 after watching a few videos and talking to my Lecturer at University. I was on the right track, I just didn't turn my textures (except the albedo) into either 'masks' or 'raw' before applying them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3wghbZ-Vh4

Watching the above Tutorial, I learnt about Fresnel, about the theory of reflectiveness, and about the physical roughness of objects means that light cannot reflect off its surface and so then it looks less shiny.

I used this image (what my lecturer showed me in class) as a reminder on how to add in height maps and ambient occlusion maps.

I also looked into vertex painting in UE4, and so I watched a few tutorials there too (I haven't actually done it myself yet, but will be very shortly (in Week 12):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRLG9Mgm5Kk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCWcH_Mktz8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl9XOtd7kaE

All three videos had different ways of setting up vertex painting and so that was a little confusing, however I generally get the idea and so will explore it further in week 12.

I watched a tutorial on how to quickly create a forest in UE4, and although it didn't actually teach my much, it was very interesting to see his workflow and to understand the importance and difference baking lights make (something I didn't know before):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoY062kY1s

Now, the below tutorial taught me how to set up paint layers in the landscape paint section. I did actually try this but with 9 textures instead of just 2, but i had allot of problems with this where all my painting work would just randomly disappear and I had to start all over again, or that i had to reapply the textures because they would randomly come up with errors etc. Very strange, but i read in the comments and found that many people had issues with this way of doing things (although not the same issues I had). I could have also been that I had too many textures and so UE4 couldn't quite keep up? maybe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsXVP0fykBM

This tutorial taught me how to change a third person play mode in UE4 into a first person player mode. This consisted of going into the character editor and changing the position of the camera and setting up a couple of nodes in the graph editor to make sure the character mover with the camera. very simple but works very well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLrPmii-Ajw

This was a simple tutorial explaining how to tile textures in UE4, this was simply done by creating a texture coordinate node and linking it up with all the textures, then changing the tiling to whatever is suitable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkY4x3DIM2M

Lastly I watched this tutorial on how to add multiple textures onto the once object in UE4. And after allot of back and forth and watching this i learnt that it all has to do with the UV material assignment in Maya, and so then when you bring it into UE4 the UV material assignment stays and you just replace the materials to whatever you want. This is very helpful and I have used it allot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yZAQMMDR8A

I brought some of my assets into UE4 and set up SO MANY SHADERS/MATERIALS... This took forever... but now i have them all done and i can use them whenever i need to. This process also took a very long time as all the textures were in TIF. files and these were not compatible with UE4 and so I had to save EVERY SINGLE IMAGE SEPARATELY... This took hours. but again, this is done now.

I played with proportion a bit and assigned the materials to the objects:

I did have a problem however where the UV's would come apart when I applied a height map which was unfortunate because the height map looked great until you notice the big gaps in the model:

I also finally finished the roof, which was also a big pain... I wanted to be able to simply duplicate a few rows and tile them on top of each other so that i didn't have to place each piece one by one, but this didn't really work as the roof was not perfectly flat. And so once i duplicated say 3 rows and moved it to above the previous rows, I would still have to place each tile individually to get the roof to flow accordingly. I also ran into a stupid problem where I was almost finished the roof and then I realised that the roof had moved at some-point, and so half of all my shingles were not matching up to the roof-line. So when I moved the roof back into position I had to replace hours worth of work . But its done now, and I duplicated the roof onto the other side. Although it looks like there are gaps this wont be noticed when the actual roof is textured.

I also manually adjusted each and every log so that it didn't look so perfect, and that each one was a little warped, a little smaller or a little bigger:

That's all I did this week, it was allot of preparation and research and redoing work. Week 12 will come together very quickly now though which is very exciting!